Door of Bruises (Thornchapel Book 4)

by Sierra Simone

  “But you gave up so much and I—”

  “I gave it up for me, Poe, and no one else. I know—I’ve always known—what you can and can’t give me.”

  She pulls back enough to kiss his temple, and he lifts his head, catching her lips in a sweet kiss. My chest aches to see it, because his longing for her is so clear. And though she obviously cares for him, loves him back in her own way, I also know what she looks like when she kisses Auden and when she kisses me, and it’s not like this.

  It is an unequal love between them, and I wish I could fix it. But I can’t.

  Auden returns with towels and damp washcloths, and he tends to Becket while the rest of us clean ourselves. And then Becket finally—and shakily—comes off the table with Auden’s help and is reunited with his wineglass, which Poe has helpfully refreshed with more prosecco. I gather up the towels with Auden and carry them to the laundry room at the end of the old wing.

  “You kept your promise,” I say as we walk. “You didn’t touch me.”

  A small smile curves his lips. “I know.”

  “But I still came for you in the end.”

  The smile gets bigger, more crooked. He seems very pleased with himself. “I know that too.”

  “You’re trying to tempt me,” I say as we go into the laundry room and drop the towels on the floor near the washing machine. “You’re not just waiting for me to make my choice, you’re trying to tempt me into it.”

  He’s still shirtless, and the air is cool. Goose bumps pepper his skin, and all I can think about is how they would taste against my tongue. Like salt and soap.

  “I’m not trying to tempt you,” he says silkily. He steps forward, crowding me against the washing machine, and caging me in place with hands braced on either side of the machine behind me. He doesn’t touch me, though. He’s still keeping his promise. “I’m only reminding you of what you get if you choose.”

  He smells like Thornchapel, like the forest, and it’s hard to think. It’s hard to think with him so close, with his eyes so bright, and his mouth so pretty, and his chest and arms and stomach so naked. “What do I get?” I ask faintly, my entire body trembling with the urge to nuzzle against him and beg forgiveness.

  Another crooked smile and then he straightens up, letting air and space and logic pour between us once more. “You get me, St. Sebastian.” And then he leaves without waiting to see if I’ll follow, his bare feet padding softly on the flagstone floor.

  I’m in so much fucking trouble.

  I’m in trouble, I’m in trouble, because I don’t know how much longer I can resist this.

  I don’t know how much longer I want to.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Rebecca

  “I wish you could see the dress I’m wearing, Rebecca, it sets off the bracelet perfectly,” my mother is saying through the phone.

  I smile, even though she can’t see it. I’m glad she likes her birthday present, but I’m even gladder that she sounds, well, happy. “The signal isn’t strong enough out here for me to do video,” I tell Ma. I’m out wandering around the excavation site now that the weather’s warmed up a bit, and while the house’s Wi-Fi is decent, I’m too far away for it to help. “But I’m glad the bracelet suits.”

  “It suits indeed!” Ma chirps. “How have you been this week? How is your . . . girlfriend?” Ma’s voice is still friendly and bright, but I can tell from the awkward cadence of the question that this is still new for her. That maybe it’s going to be new for a long time.

  I hesitate before answering. After the episode in the French restaurant, it became clear to me that I’m not capable of discussing my personal life without having emotions, and accordingly, I’m no longer allowing myself to discuss anything more intimate than work and what audiobook I’m listening to. I used to solve this particular problem by not having a personal life to speak of, but alas. Yet another villainy to lay at Delphine’s pedicured feet among the many others she’s inflicted on me. Other villainies like unceasing loneliness . . . and unrelenting horniness . . . and a punishing, aching need to have her tied to my bed and whimpering my name.

  “Delphine’s fine,” I lie to Ma. I don’t like lying, but it’s better than the alternative, which would involve the truth, and right now the truth involves tears. And even though it’s ultimately pointless since I don’t actually have a girlfriend, I don’t want to spoil this new progress between us. After all this time, to have Ma ask about a girlfriend—even if she’s stilted and ambivalent as she does—is . . . affecting.

  It’s better than affecting. It’s good. It’s progress where I never even thought to hope for it.

  “I’m glad,” Ma says. I can practically hear her search for the right words. “Do you think she’ll ever come home with you? To Accra?”

  My throat goes tight, imagining this thing that will never happen. If I brought a husband home, he would be fussed over and fed, there would be not-so-subtle interrogations about grandchildren. We’d be able to go everywhere and expect fondness and welcome wherever we went.

  But if I brought Delphine home, that would not be the case. Even if Ma is ready, our family might not be. Her friends and her church certainly wouldn’t be. And our safety in public—at the very least, our peace in public—wouldn’t be assured. Not that it’s assured anywhere else, but at home, we would have to take real care.

  I blow out a breath and remember that this is all fake anyway. I don’t have a girlfriend for my mother’s church friends to make faces about anymore. I don’t have a Delphine to protect from side-eyes or insults or snubs.

  “You may have to meet her the next time you come to London,” I say, and that lie is strangely the one that hurts most of all.

  We talk for a while longer, and it ends up being pleasant, actually pleasant, and then we end the call, and I’m smiling. Smiling. After a call with my mother.

  What a world.

  I slip my phone into my pocket and continue wandering around the site. Tally and his team have left and taken everything with them, and so where there used to be a maze and then a swarm of archaeologists and their associated detritus, there is now only dark, bare soil and the sporadic stone boxes of the graves.

  Auden told me he wouldn’t be bothered if I wanted to implement my original plan—a labyrinth of gravel and turf—but it would necessitate covering over the kistvaens and the thought bothers me. I’m not sure why, since they’ve been buried for millennia, but it feels wrong somehow. Like Thornchapel has offered us something and I’m contemplating kicking clods of dirt back over it and consigning it to obscurity.

  After a while, I find a grassy patch to sit on near the terrace, and I simply look out over the space. I have my notebook with me and a pencil, but the notebook is empty, the pencil unused. Landscape architecture is really about two things when it comes down to it: need and response.

  What is the need of the project?

  And what is the project responding to in its environment?

  The answer to those two questions—and the interplay between those two answers—is usually the seed of the idea. The core of any inspiration.

  But now I’m stumped. Empty.

  What is the need here? Of Thornchapel?

  And what am I responding to?

  The house? The woods?

  The graves?

  I’m deep in thought when someone comes and sits next to me. Knee-high boots and leggings. A jumper and a scarf. Blond waves everywhere and lipstick the color of kousa leaves in autumn.

  My belly clenches as I turn to look at her. I’ve been trying to avoid her for a week and a half, doing my damnedest to keep an eye on her to make sure she doesn’t go out to the door while also keeping a large enough distance that I won’t be tempted to do more.

  Like ask about the toy I got her.

  Like ask if I can see her wearing the necklace.

  Like ask if she’ll pull down her knickers and show me her pussy.

  And I was doing damn good at all of that—even if
I did have to slip up to my room for a wank now and then—but now here she is. Looking like a fuckable pumpkin spice latte and close enough that I can smell her, smell her berry and violet scent.

  I pick up my notebook just so I can have something to do with my hands that’s not grabbing her.

  “Yes?” I ask, trying to sound brisk and indifferent, but I forget that my brisk voice is an awful lot like my mistress voice. And she likes my mistress voice too much.

  She gives me a little pout, a bratty little pout, and I nearly die with the effort it takes not to pull her over my lap. “I just wanted to see what you were doing.”

  “I’m working,” I say.

  She leans over to peer at the blank notebook page, her hair and her big scarf and her jumper all brushing against my shoulder. I have an abrupt and vivid fantasy of tying her wrists together with that scarf and then shoving her jumper up to her chest so I could look at her tits.

  “Doesn’t look like you’ve gotten very much work done to me,” she says doubtfully.

  “I’m thinking, that’s all. Thinking is work too.”

  “Especially for a genius,” she teases, and I have to close my eyes.

  Why does she have to be so sweet? Why did she have to hurt me and then go and still be so perfect?

  I’m suddenly tired, so, so tired. Of her being so bewitchingly her and of my heart being so stupidly besotted.

  “Why are you really here, Delphine?” I ask, looking over at her. She bites her orangey-red lip as she looks back at me, blinking those big, honey-brown eyes. With her gold hair and pink cheeks, she is every color of autumn at once, a full harvest of loveliness.

  She’s also brave. So brave to come to me when I’ve thrown up every wall between us that I possibly can.

  “I want to know why you care about the door,” she finally says. “I want to know why you care if the door can hurt me when you so obviously hate me.”

  “I don’t hate you.” It’s automatic, pulled right out of me. “You know I don’t hate you, Delph.”

  “But you haven’t forgiven me.”

  “Did you expect me to?”

  The hurt that flashes in her eyes is gone as soon as I see it, and she draws herself up a little, as if this was a wound she’d already known she’d receive. “No, Rebecca. I didn’t. But you still haven’t answered my question, not really. Why do you care about the door if you no longer care about me?”

  I should tell her that just because I can’t trust her with my heart doesn’t mean I want her harmed or dead. I should tell her that she’s still a friend of my friend, that she’s part of this little clan of ours for better or for worse, that she’s a fellow human and therefore I have the duty to see to her safety when I can.

  I should tell her all those things, and yet what comes out is, “You’re still mine.”

  I want to fling myself backwards and scream the minute the words leave my mouth, because they are so idiotic and reckless, because I didn’t know they were true until I spoke them—but here we are. In my deepest parts, in my guts and in my marrow, I want Delphine Dansey to belong to me. I want her heart. I want her body.

  I want her.

  I’ve struck her speechless, I can tell. Her pretty, fall-colored lips part and then press together and then part again. I let go of my notebook and nearly reach for her, but I dig my hands into the cool grass instead, refusing to make a confession of my body along with a confession of my words.

  But the words are still there, chasing circles in my mind, demanding to be spoken again and again . . . ideally while my hands are tangled in her hair and her tongue is between my legs . . .

  You’re still mine.

  You’re still mine.

  I grip the grass harder. It’s lush and thick, tickling my palms.

  “Rebecca . . . ” she finally breathes.

  “Yes,” I say. I don’t know whether I’m acknowledging my name or confirming what I said earlier.

  She doesn’t seem to know either. And then she’s getting up, all grace and supple movements, even in boots and a giant scarf.

  I don’t want her to go—don’t go—

  “Delph, wait—”

  “I’ll see you at supper,” she says quickly, already walking away. “Tomorrow’s the equinox and we need to plan, and I . . . I’ll see you at supper.”

  She’s up the steps and disappeared into the house before I can do a single thing about it. Fuck.

  “You’re still mine,” I murmur to the spot where she was sitting. I murmur it to hear the words aloud, to hear if they sound as true as they feel. “You’re still mine.”

  The grass beneath my left palm is tickling even more now, and I finally let go. I make to get my notebook and go inside and work—as if I’ll be able to concentrate until I can see her again—but when I look down to pick it up, what I see nearly stops my heart.

  There’s a violet. Right where my hand had been. Right where there had only been grass before.

  A violet in September. A lone violet with no others around.

  A violet grown under my palm, as if I willed it into sprouting and blooming just for me.

  I pluck it and then stare at it for a very long time.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Delphine

  I’m wearing A-Go-Go by KVD when I sit down in my room and stare at myself in the mirror. My cheeks are flushed, my eyes are bright. I look like I’ve just stepped off a sailboat or climbed out of a speedy little convertible.

  I look like a girl exhilarated.

  You’re still mine.

  I get up again and pace. I press my hands to my cheeks. My heart is like a church bell inside my ribs, tolling great big tolls with each and every beat. I want it to be true; I feel like it’s true. I have to still be hers—of course I’m still hers. The necklace. The toy. The fact that she’s here while I’m here, even if she does avoid me most of the time.

  But I can’t mistake this for love. Or even for forgiveness. I threw all those things away when I kissed Emily Genovese.

  I stare down at the dressing table, which is covered in makeup and things, even though I’ve only been here a week. I pick up a tube—the tube—and uncap it, staring down at the bright red lipstick inside. It’s been smoothed over from use even though it’s only a few weeks old, and there’s a ring of red around the rim from where my shaking hands had made a mess of capping the tube the first few times.

  But now—now I can look at it without shaking. I can touch it, think about it, even wear it, and still be a human girl and not whatever mess of tears and panic I used to be.

  Cherry Tree.

  I don’t put it on my lips now, but I do rotate the tube so that the red little ingot of lipstick is exposed, and then I draw a line of it along the inside of my forearm.

  This is how we started, Dr. Joy and me—this is how we worked our way up to me being able to wear the lipstick again. Or more accurately, this is how we started after three weeks of foundational exposure therapy. I would sit in her office and she would have a bowl of cherries on her desk. I would stand by the window and say the words cherry tree over and over again. I would drape my legs in an old ratty afghan she had with a cherry pattern appliquéd on; I would color a cherry in a children’s coloring book with colored pencils; I would watch videos with Dr. Joy where cherries were picked, processed, and jarred.

  It was bad, at first. So bad. When Dr. Joy and I first began working on this, and she mentioned having a bowl of cherries on her desk as a possible exposure, I remember thinking, that’s not so difficult, I can do that at home, on my own. All of the exposures sounded so innocuous, so easy, not at all like something that would require someone’s help to endure.

  And yet.

  I burst into tears when she set the bowl of cherries on the table.

  I threw up during the first five minutes of saying cherry tree.

  When I colored the cherry in the coloring book, I begged between sobs to be allowed to go wash my hands because they’d touched the picture and
I could feel the cherry on my skin.

  If anyone had been watching, they might have thought they were watching an unethical psychological experiment from the 1970s, they might have thought they were watching some perverse, creative form of torture. But the torture was the cure. Dr. Joy said loads of things about neural connectivity and emotional down-regulation and reconsolidating memory, but what it boiled down to was this: for trauma reasons, my brain had forged a link that didn’t need to exist, a link between Cherry Tree lipstick and existential violence. And every time I balked at cherries, avoided them, panicked at the thought of Cherry Tree anywhere near me, I was tacitly informing my brain that the link was necessary and helpful. That my amygdala was correct to flood my body with cortisol and adrenaline whenever I encountered—or even thought of—a particular lipstick and its namesake fruit.

  It was like grooves on a record or paths worn into an old rug. A feedback loop. An association grown stronger and more potent with time, like a whisky or a wine.

  So we made new loops. We emptied the casks.

  From the ashes of that visceral, terrible panic, we began untangling my brain. I would remember that awful night and talk through it, I would describe what was happening in my body as I did. That my fingers were numb or my skin clammy or my neck hot with the urge to run or that I could smell wet grass and spilled beer.

  Processing is what Dr. Joy called it.

  Misery is what I called it.

  But it worked. With time—so many sessions a week, every week since mid-July—and grit and a healthy dose of mindfulness and breathing, Cherry Tree’s hold on me began to wane. And so did the hold of that awful night.

  It is still there, of course, and it will always be there, but it is more scar than wound now. More seam than tear. And I can smear Cherry Tree on my forearm and still breathe, still think, I can still be me.

  But right now, I’m staring down at it and regretting that I hadn’t been honest with Dr. Joy and my parents and Auden and Rebecca from the start. It lost me years.

  It lost me her.